Another group of landmarks set to have names changed to eliminate offensive reference to Native American women

JOSEPH -- Oregon maps still have about 100 landmarks that include the offensive "squaw" in their names, but some of the holdouts on the list are expected to change soon.

The Oregon Geographic Names Board meets Saturday to consider renaming a creek and spring in Wallowa County, plus roughly 30 other geographic names across six eastern Oregon counties.

Board members will focus on the names of 15 sites in Grant County, 10 in Wallowa County, five each in Baker and Harney counties, three in Union County and one in Malheur County. All include the slur that was historically used to disparage Native American women.

Coming up

What: The Oregon Geographic Names Board meets.

When: Saturday

Where: 18905 N.E. San Rafael St. in Gresham.

The state must eventually deal with other sites around the state, but it's proving a lengthy process to find appropriate names that everyone likes, said Sharon Nesbit, president of the names board.

"The question is whether any of us will live long enough to see it all done," Nesbit said.

In many cases, the names to be considered this weekend will be replaced by Native American names that distinguished the same sites long before the coming of white Europeans, she said. The Confederated Umatilla, Walla Walla and Cayuse Tribes near Pendleton have offered 45 names for consideration and the Burns-Paiute Tribe of Harney County have offered 43.

The names board has its work cut out because:

-- The Umatilla and the Burns-Paiute tribes have given different names for the same sites in almost a dozen cases.

-- Adopting names in the original language could make the spelling and pronunciation difficult for map users, both Native American and non-Native Amerian. The Umatilla tribes also have written their proposed substitute names with linguistic marks while the Burns-Paiute Tribe placed hyphens between syllables.

-- Coming up with substitute Native American names could be more difficult in western Oregon in the years ahead. The state's eastern tribes and languages are more or less intact compared to westside tribes that were devastated by disease and other factors during the European immigration period, Nesbit said.

The name changes follow a 2001 call by the Legislature to eliminate the word from Oregon place names. Four years later, state lawmakers directed the names board to consider tribal names for the sites.

Umatilla and Burns-Paiute tribes have sought out elders and historians to come up with traditional names to replace the offending ones.

The word squaw is believed to be an Algonquin tribal word with no historic roots in the Northwest, Nesbit said. It was carried east from what is now southern Quebec and eastern Ontario, Canada, and then to the West Coast by mountain men and French voyagers, she said. Lewis and Clark, in their 1804-06 expedition to the Pacific Ocean and back, referred to Native American women in their journals as "squars," Nesbit noted.

The names board also will be asked to change Buffalo Peak in Lane County to Buffalo Rock. And it may name a cluster of unnamed offshore rocks in Lincoln County -- Schooner Rocks, she said.